"And these goddamn Bonus Marchers, they ought to get the hell out of here," Brattle said, "go home and get a damn job. Contribute something."
"Come on, Charlie," Keegan said, "these aren't malingerers. They can't find jobs, for Christ sake. You've got to have a college degree to get a job as an elevator man in Macy's. Since the first of the year, a quarter of a million people have lost their homes."
"And five thousand banks have gone into the hole because of it," Brattle snapped back. "People don't meet their responsibilities. Jesus, there's eleven million farmers out there holding off the banks and insurance companies with goddamn shotguns, refusing to pay their mortgages."
"Yeah, and they're burning corn because it's cheaper than coal and killing their livestock because they can't afford to feed them," Keegan said. "You can't relate to any of this, you've never been broke. It'll hit you one of these mornings when you wake up and wonder why you don't have steak with your eggs."
"Whose side are you on, anyway?" Brattle asked edgily.
"I didn't know there were sides."
"Hoover's got it under control," said one of the guests, a youngish man wearing a striped jacket and a straw boater. "Did you see the Tribune this morning? Gross National Product's up, economy's looking brighter . . ."
"That's bullshit and you know it."
Brattle's wife gasped.
"Sorry," Keegan said, "I forgot where I was for a minute."
"Well, I should hope so," Brattle growled.
Keegan leaned back in his chair and picked up a copy of the afternoon Star from a chair. He held it up for everyone at the table to see.
"Here's our great president in his celluloid collar and button-up shoes telling a troop of Girl Scouts how great things are. ‘Nobody has ever died of starvation in this country,' he says. Then we turn to this little three-paragraph yarn on page twenty-six." Keegan read it slowly: " ‘The New York City Welfare Department said today twenty-nine people died of starvation in June in the city and 194 others, mostly children, died of malnutrition.'" He paused for a moment. "Which page of the paper do you read?"
There was a momentary pall over the conversation, then Evelyn Brattle said cryptically, "Well, that's New York City for you."
A young woman shook her shoulders. "It's the stock market," she peeped. "Too many people were playing the stock market who didn't know what they were doing."
"That's right, darlin'," Brattle said smugly. "Listen, investors lost seventy-four billion dollars in the stock market, Francis, that's three times what the war cost, and most of them were upper-middle-class jerks who shouldn't have been in it in the first place."
"But they pumped it up for people like us, right, Charlie?"
"You're beginning to sound like a goddamn Bolshevist."
Keegan had laughed. "Same old story," he countered, "if you don't think like I do, you're a Red."
"Well, hell, it's a natural process," Brattle said, brushing off the comment. "The world goes through this kind of thing every thirty, forty, fifty years. Leans out the population. Gets rid of the runts."
Never mind that many of those destroyed were bankers, brokers, their own peers, a fact that was obvious from the number of homburgs and chesterfield coats in the soup kitchen lineups. Brattle's attitude was typical; the rich "leaning out" the runts of the litter. So Keegan suppressed his disdain. There was no discussing it further with the people at Brattle's table. Theirs was the hardened attitude of the fats against the leans.
About nine o'clock, Keegan heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire. A few minutes later the sweet, stinging odor of tear gas drifted out across the river.
Then came the other sounds: the faraway screams, the neighing of horses and the bizarre creaking of tank treads on cobblestones. And suddenly the night seemed lit by dozens of fires.
"By God, it's started!" Brattle cried out. "Hoover's finally moving on the bastards."
The dinner party pressed against the railing of the yacht, searching the night for a view of the battle. Then another yacht cruised past and someone yelled, "Hey Charlie, they're crossing the Eleventh Street Bridge!"
Brattle had immediately ordered his captain to move the yacht out into the river and down to the bridge, there to join other yachts and pleasure boats crowded near the shore to watch the tawdry spectacle. They moved in closer for a better look, lying close to the bridge, where a major named Eisenhower had set up machine guns to prevent the ex-soldiers from moving back into the city. They watched as a chunky major on horseback, wearing pearl-handled revolvers, ordered his men to douse the ragged main village on the edge of the Anacostia River with gasoline and burn it. The scene became nightmarish. Flames broiled into the black sky and horses and men with brandished sabers galloped to and fro in front of the crackling inferno. Tear gas bombs were lobbed through the night and burst on the sidewalks as women and children ran screaming before the onslaught.
Keegan suddenly felt a desperate need to know what was happening. He stood on the deck of the yacht horrified by what the army was doing to its own ex-comrades in arms, recalling a time fourteen years before when he had been a small part of the catastrophe that had started all this.
At that moment, standing on the deck of Brattle's yacht, Keegan felt a desperate need for a Bert Rudman to describe the full sweep of what was happening around him. Could this incredible attack on the veterans be happening all over the city, or was this an isolated incident of violence? He had to know.
"By God, they're cleaning that bunch of Commies out," Brattle proudly proclaimed, slapping his leg.
"They're not Commies, for God's sake, they're army veterans," Keegan cried out angrily, and whirling on his heels, ordered the yacht's long boat to take him back to the pier.
On the way to the hotel, Jocko had skirted what had been the major thrust of the army's attack on the Bonus villages, the streets littered with used tear gas canisters and remnants of canvas and cardboard houses. As they passed an abandoned park, Keegan told Jocko to stop.
Keegan got out of the car, threw off his jacket and tie and walked down a knoll, out into the remains of one of the tent villages, now a scene of devastation. Nothing was left standing.
A man in a tattered shirt, its right sleeve folded up over the stub of his missing arm and pinned at the shoulder, wandered numbly toward him, stumbling through the remnants of the camp, silhouetted by the fires of the main camp several blocks away. He stopped for a moment and stared at a ragged sign, "God bless our home," fluttering feebly from a shattered tent pole.
Tear gas tears had made scant streaks in the dirt on the man's cheeks. On his shirt were pinned a Purple Heart and a Silver Star. He moved on, stumbling in shock through the wreckage of the Bonus village, staring bleakly at the ruined tents, the burned lean-tos, the shattered remains of chicken coop houses and cardboard shacks, and the trampled gardens and broken suitcases and ragged remains of clothing. He looked under pieces of cardboard and canvas.
"Tommy!" he yelled. "Tommy-boy, it's yer dad."
He almost bumped into Keegan, so intent was he on examining the wreckage scattered around him. He looked Keegan up and down, studying his freshly laundered shirt and Palm Beach pants.
"What the hell're you doin' here?" he demanded with hatred in every syllable.
"Looks like the Argonne the day after," Keegan said softly.
"You was there, at the Argonne?"
Keegan nodded.
"No worse than this," the man croaked bitterly.
He started to babble, his sentences running together almost incoherently. "We fit with honor there, this is our shame, they's dishonored the flag and the army, that fat pig in the White House and his pimp, MacArthur. It's a parade! m‘boy Tommy says this afternoon and we all goes up there to Pennsylvania Avenue and we're standin' there watchin' the army paradin' down the street, some of us even cheerin' them . . . then . . . then they come down on us, they come down on us, cavalry, a whole battalion of machine gunners. I seen the standard of the 34th Infantry
, too, my very outfit and them with their bayonets pulled, oh goddamn, can you believe it, we all thought it was some kind of parade, the army was comin' out to support us, some of us cheerin' like that. Jesus, man, we don't have guns, we don't have bayonets er horses, for God's sake they had tanks. Tanks come at us! Suddenly that bastard suddenly up and orders a charge. Oh, that miserable polo-playin' sonofabitch dandy, Patton, with his fancy goddamn ivory-handled goddamn guns ordering those soldiers, soldiers! Our own goddamn comrades, cutting us down with their sabers like we was wheat in a field at harvest, runnin' us down like we was pigs in a sty, oh, I seen 'em spear two young lads no older than my Tommy and they trampled half a dozen women under their horses, women and children has died here today . . . a baby lies back there dead in his maw's arms of tear gas, goddamn, of god, god, damn! Got to find m‘wife and boy, he's only seven, got away from me when they come down on us with them fuckin' horses. Chasin' after his dog and my Emma went after him and I lost 'em both in the smoke and the dark and the gas. Oh goddamn, goddamn those miserable bastards. They's dishonored the flag, every man who ever raised a gun to defend it, every man who ever fit for his country and wore his uniform proudly. Well, I spit on the flag and never again will I be able to salute it without my heart tearing apart inside me. The shame, the shame. . . ."
He wandered off through the haze, still babbling, breaking the monotone of his outraged dialogue occasionally to call after his wife and child.
The blue haze of tear gas now stung Keegan's eyes and the skin on his arms. Framed against the sky's orange glow, he saw Patton, a block away, astride his white horse, leading it through the destruction, stopping occasionally to praise his marauders with a "Well done" or "Good show." Keegan stumbled back through the battlefield to the car where Jocko Nayles was leaning against the front fender, tears gushing from his good eye.
"I don't believe this," he said. "We fought side by side with some of these boys, Frank."
"I know, I know," Keegan had answered, trying to regain some semblance of composure. "Let's get out of here, Jocko."
They had gone back to the hotel, slept fitfully and left before dawn for the two-day drive back to Boston. By the first light of dawn, the main highway leading from Washington had looked like the aftermath of Gettysburg or Atlanta. Women, children, tattered men, confused and lost, straggling like robots along the two-lane blacktop highway, a vagabond population with no place to live, nothing to eat and no hope in their tortured eyes on an aimless pilgrimage to nowhere, for they had no homes to return to. Under every bridge and beside every railroad crossing were ragged Hoovervilles, tent cities filled with decent men who rode the rails from one desperate camp to the next in search of hope; men who had lost faith in their institutions, the banks, the manufacturers, the insurance companies, their leaders.
They stopped for gas and Keegan had bought a morning paper, hoping to get the same sense of the tragic sweep of the night's events that once he had gotten from Bert Rudman's story of Belleau Wood, yearning to know what misguided insanity had sent an army against these men who had once faced death for their flag. But the stories were fragmented, inconclusive, inaccurate. On the front page, Hoover praised MacArthur for "delivering us from the siege of Washington" and later in the story: "Beware the crowd—it destroys, it consumes, it hates—but it never builds."
Keegan crushed the paper and threw it on the floor.
"When we got to New York we drove up to Roosevelt's campaign headquarters and I wrote him a check for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. It wasn't just that, it was a lot of things, that just brought it all to a head. Anyway, a week later I left and I've been here ever since." He stopped for a moment, watching a group of swans paddling down the estuary toward them.
"And now you miss it and you want to go home," she said. "You have not given up on America. Some of us have not given up on Germany either."
He nodded slowly. "You made your point," he said. "But Jen, you have to go on living. People still fall in love and get married, have kids. Hitler can't stop that. Politics and love don't have anything to do with each other. That's oil and water. Sure, things are bad, that's even more reason to get out. Marry me, darling. Come to America. Give it a chance. When things settle down here, we'll come back."
"I love you desperately," she stammered, "but I . . . I . . ." She stopped, trying to sort out all the threads of the dilemma, and sensing her dismay he reached up and laid his hand on her cheek.
"Hey," he said tenderly, "forget it for now. Look at the swans."
The swans moved slowly past, drifting aimlessly with the current.
"Did you know the only time swans utter a sound is when they're making love and when they die?"
"Oh, you made that up," she said.
"Absolutely true," he said, placing his hand over his heart. "That's why they call a dying man's last words his swan song."
She laid her hand on his chest and fear flickered momentarily across her face. He leaned over and kissed her. Her lips, soft and full, parted slowly and her tongue caressed his lower lip.
"Never fear," he whispered. "There'll be no swan songs for us."
TWENTY
Spring came early that year, bringing with it relief from the winter snows, much-needed rain and honey-sweet prairie winds which urged the first sprouts of corn and wheat above the ground and promised that 1934, like the five years before it, would be a fertile and prosperous year. Once the land of the Delaware and Potawatomi Indians, the central plains of Indiana were extremely fertile, abounding in lush produce and hogs the size of ponies, of which the Hoosiers were justifiably proud. This was the sweet land of Booth Tarkington and James Whitcomb Riley, a land settled by Scottish, Irish and German descendants who only begrudgingly acknowledged that Cole Porter, writer of "dirty" songs for blue Broadway shows, was also from the Hoosier State.
There was a small billboard on Route 36 that read: "Drew City, Indiana. Founded 1846. Home of 2,162 happy people," under which someone had painted "and one old grouch." A signpost a hundred feet past it had arrows pointing northwest toward Chicago, one hundred and forty miles away, to South Bend, eighty-one miles north, and Indianapolis, seventy-two miles to the south.
Drew City was a typical mid-American town, located on the southeast bank of the Wabash River, along the route of the Illinois Central Railroad, and proud of its heritage—the Battle of Tippecanoe having been fought near Lafayette, twenty or so miles away. The town was surrounded by miles of fertile, sweeping fields of yellow wheat, head-high stalks of juicy corn and the sweetest tomatoes in the country, if you listened to the farmers talk on Saturdays in front of Jason's hardware store or in the park across the street from the courthouse where they congregated to trade lies and gossip once a week. There were four churches in town, which was about a third Catholic, the rest being Lutheran, Episcopal and Presbyterian. There were two Jewish families, no colored people and a small community of Mennonites a few miles east of town.
The main drag, called Broadway although it was barely two lanes wide, was actually Highway 36. The streets were paved for three blocks on either side of the main street, and there was a small park at the edge of town on the bank of the river with a baseball diamond maintained by the Masons, half a dozen cooking fireplaces, and several wooden tables. The Illinois Central was located on the far side of the river, crossing a bridge to the outskirts west of town. Neither isolated nor along the main traffic routes, it was a prosperous town for the times, for while it had felt the sting of the Depression, there had been five or six years of good harvest and the town's two industries, a machine mill and switching station for the Illinois Central, and a shoe factory, had both survived the ravages of the Depression relatively intact.
There was nothing quaint or unique about Drew City. It was a plain American small town, a town of stucco, brick and wood, of galvanized iron rooftops, cornices and Victorian parapets, squatting in the flatlands of northern Indiana, distinguished only by its citizens who had the same ailments, proble
ms and minor victories as folks in any other town of its size. The business section was actually only two blocks long. There were stores on the first floors of the two-story brick buildings and above them, professional offices. Dr. Kimberly, the family doctor, was over the Dairy Foods and Dr. Hancrafter, the dentist, was across the street over Brophy's Dry Goods Shoppe. The town lawyer, William Horton, who drank a lot, was over Aaron Moore's Drug Emporium, his sign reading "W. B. Horton, Atty at Law," and on the line under it "Wills—Divorces—Complaints." Horton's office was perfectly placed since he started each day in Aaron's drugstore, hunched over one of the tiny round tables in the front of the store by the soda fountain, nursing his hangover with a B-C fizz chased with black coffee.
The town had its share of ne'er-do-wells, alcoholics and eccentrics but it had escaped the collapse in morals and the increase in alcoholics and gambling brought on by the Roaring Twenties and the Depression. When the Literary Digest reported that seven out of every ten people, evenly divided as to sex, had relations prior to marriage, it was a shock to the nervous system of the town and a subject to be discussed in whispers in Mildred Constantine's beauty salon and over weekly bridge games where backseat petting was still regarded by some as a sin and an overture to unmarried pregnancy and even worse, abortion, a word never spoken above a whisper in public.
True, teachers and the police were paid in scrip, slips of paper which were like promissory notes from civic employers, a promise to pay when things got better, but scrip was honored almost everyplace in town. The bank had survived the crash and the town had only one suicide, an accountant for the railroad who had been playing fast and loose with company funds until the crash cleaned him out. He had gone down to the picnic grounds by the river, finished off a pint of bathtub gin he got from Miss Belinda Allerdy's and done himself in with a shotgun.